Epilogue
It does not follow that there were not at that time Jewish communities
who conducted their lives in accordance with what they believed to be Jew-
ish law, or that there was not a continuous maintenance of legal doctrine
from the biblical period, through the drastically changing political structures
within which Jews lived at successive periods, eventually to give birth to the
rules proclaimed by the rabbis who appear in the Mishnah. But, exactly as
with the study of ‘‘Roman law,’’ in one or other of various linked but distinc-
tive senses,ifthe purpose of our study is historical, then the primacy must go
to asking what forms of authority and jurisdiction are attested incontemporary
documents, and what sets of legal principles are found being applied there.
Nothing of what is said above implies that in any of the fields mentioned
—Greek or Roman history, Roman law, ‘‘rabbinic’’ Judaism—we should jetti-
son (or pretend to jettison) the vast store of information about the ancient
world preserved in medieval manuscripts. But itisan assertion that, in every
aspect, from the histories of the languages and scripts concerned to the na-
ture and values of the different societies studied, the volume and variety of
contemporary evidence which can now be encountered directly, along with
the unparalleled extent to which the physical traces of the ancient world can
be ‘‘seen,’’ whether directly or through photographic or electronic images,
means that the logical structure of our relation to that world has (at least
potentially) been completely transformed.
The same is, or should be, true of the most significant of all examples of
an ancient canonical text transmitted through medieval manuscripts. Once
again, if we wish to take ‘‘the Bible’’ (or rather, in the vast majority of cases,
one or other modern printed translation of it) as the object of religious or
literary study, that is entirely legitimate. That is, in essence, to take the com-
bined effect of medieval copying and of early modern and more recent print-
ing of the Hebrew, and then of medieval and modern copying and printing
of the Greek and Latin versions, and finally translations into modern lan-
guages, as constituting what the object of study ‘‘is’’ for us. There are then any
number of possible approaches to it, from pious search for the word of God
to comparative religion, study of the religious customs portrayed, anthro-
pological analysis (as by Mary Douglas on Leviticus),^27 or concentration on
language or literary forms.
But suppose that none of these were our immediate concern, but that our
interest were, in one or other of several different senses, historical. If that
interest related to what is conveniently called the ‘‘ancient world,’’ let us say,
in the Near Eastern context, to the thousand years between Alexander and
. See M. Douglas,Leviticus as Literature().